He ended the column by saying:—
"Whether these essays were worth writing is of course a question which lies between Canon Emeric and his publisher. That they are not worth reading we have no hesitation in saying.
"If anyone were so childish as to take the advice given in this book seriously, he would find that all the time he could spare from worship he would spend in neglecting the obligations of religion."
It took him about two hours to produce the criticism in its finished state, and then he began to have a last smoke before going to bed. As with so many men, he found that at no time did his ideas come so rapidly, or shape themselves so well, as during the smoking of that last cigarette.
The fire was blazing, and he drew his chair up closer, leaning back and enjoying in every nerve a moment of intense physical ease.
There was no more innocent picture to be found in London than the well-furnished room lit by the dancing firelight, with the handsome young man in the chair lazily watching the blue cigarette smoke slowly twisting itself into strange fantastic shapes. The powers of Asmodeus were here a failure.
Next day, when he had written to his Oxford friends and to Marjorie Lovering, his sweetheart in the country, he went to The Pilgrim office with his review and saw Heath. The two editorial rooms were on the second floor looking out into the Strand. Big bare places littered with paper, cigarette ends, and type-written copy, with none of the tape machines, telephones, and fire-calls that are found in the offices of a daily. Heath was seated at a writing-table "making up" the issue for the week, while his assistant, a man named Wild, was looking through a batch of cuttings from Romeike's in the hope of finding what he called "spicy pars" for the front page. Gobion was well received, and after he had explained that he was going to stay in town, and was open for any amount of work, he was offered a permanent salary of two pounds ten shillings a week, to do half the reviewing for the paper. Naturally he accepted at once, and was pleased at his good luck, for though the pay was small it was regular.
Heath was a very large, fat man, with no hair on his face, and a quick, nervous smile which ended high in the pendant flabbiness of his cheeks. He was well and fashionably dressed in dark grey, the frock coat, tight-fitting as it was, making his vast size and huge hips seem the more noticeable. He was smoking a cigar, and gave Gobion one.
It was lunch time when the bargain was concluded, and Gobion, Wild, and Heath went out together. Gobion, who, obeying the precept of Iago, had put money in his purse, asked them to lunch with him at Romano's. Heath laughed.
"My dear Yardly Gobion, lunch at Romano's! No thanks; it would cost you five pounds and be far too respectable. No, you shall certainly pay for the lunch—eh Wild?—but I will show you where to get it."
He turned up a side street and entered a small court, not far from the stage door of the Lyceum, at the end of which was a door. They went in and found a suite of three largish rooms opening one out of the other. The first was fitted up as a restaurant, while the other two were smoking-lounges with a bar in each. Comfort, brutal unæsthetic comfort, was the most obvious thing in all three rooms. The chairs were comfortable, the carpets soft, while big cheery fires burnt in the open grates. No one was in the dining-room, but through the half-open curtains, which separated the lounge from the dining-room, came snatches of conversation, the sound of soda-water corks, and the shrill laughter of a London barmaid, than which few things are more unpleasant.